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The HEVC/H.265 standard, which offers a number of improvements over current H.264 implementations, has now been finalized. It should now be a matter of months until you begin to see devices (smartphones, graphics cards) that support H.265 decode, though whether these implementations will be in hardware, or shoddy, battery-sucking software, remains to be seen.

Why H.265 is superior to H.264

Repeated quality comparison tests have demonstrated that H.265 reduces file size by roughly 39-44% at the same quality compared to H.264. This figure can change dramatically depending on how quality control is measured. In subjective viewing tests, subjects reported HEVC’s quality was equal to or greater than H.264’s with a bitrate reduction of 51-74%. That’s substantially better than what a comparison of peak signal-to-noise (PSNR) values would predict. The subjective viewing tests were conducted with multiple subjects across a wide range of video samples, and while they aren’t the final word on the topic, these are hugely encouraging results.

The current HEVC standard describes three profiles: Main, Main 10, and Main Still Picture. Main supports 8-bit color while Main 10 implements 10-bit color. Both profiles limit chroma subsampling to 4:2:0. Extensions to the standard, expected in 2014, will allow for 4:2:2 and 4:4:4 sampling, and multiview video coding (3D).

H.265 is designed to use a more efficient means of encoding pixel data and incorporates larger blocks of pixels than H.264’s macroblocks did. It can divide a picture into tiles for more efficient parallel processing and decode slices independently for better resynchronization. Intra-prediction specifies 33 directional modes (up from eight in H.264) and offers better motion compensation processing and vector prediction.

H.264’s macroblocks vs coding tree units

Right now, there’s some overlap between what H.265 and various extended H.264 profiles can do. H.264 Hi10P, for example, supports 10-bit video. There’s even an H.264 profile (Hi444PP) that supports 4:4:4 chroma subsampling and 14-bit color. In these cases, the difference between H.265 and H.264 is that the former will eventually deliver the same capabilities using significantly less bandwidth.

The tradeoff is processing power. H.265 requires substantially more computational power to decode than H.264, Early chips that support H.265 have already been announced — Broadcom made a splash with its Brahma BCM7445 at CES earlier this month, but that chip is something of a beast. It’s a 28nm quad-core processor that’s capable of transcoding four 1080p30 streams or driving HEVC video at up to 4096×2160.

MPEG-2 and native content

So how long until you can buy an HEVC-capable device? That’s going to depend on a host of factors. Companies like AMD and Nvidia will likely integrate H.265 decode capabilities in fairly short order, though we may see features added as new components of the specification are developed. First-generation chips might only conform to the now-finalized standard, with support for H.265 multiview decode added once that extension is finalized.

Based on how various companies handled H.264 decode capabilities, we’ll probably see some fudging as far as device-level compatibility is concerned. Smartphones and tablets with enough CPU power to handle H.265 decode can be advertised as H.265-capable with software updates, even if they chew through battery life like a fat kid on cake when handling the task. The companies talking up H.265, like Qualcomm and Broadcom, see the new video standard as a way to differentiate devices and sell consumers on next-generation products. For the media companies actually responsible for serving up content, it’s quite a bit more complicated.

Right now, terrestrial cable is dominated by MPEG-2 broadcasts. The good news is that H.265 could finally give broadcasters reason to ditch MPEG-2 by reducing bandwidth consumption by 70-80% for the same content. That’s enough to provide the impetus for stepping up to full 1080p broadcasting and leaving 720p/1080i behind. The flip side, however, is that broadcasters have precious little reason to innovate. Most cable companies face limited competition in their target markets. Satellite companies will likely adopt H.265 first, thanks to the potential bandwidth savings.

Long-term, H.265 is going to be the standard of choice for UHDTV’s 4K and 8K resolutions (See: 8K UHDTV: How do you send a 48Gbps TV signal over terrestrial airwaves?) — but that brings up the other issue. Currently, there’s no native 4K content. HEVC’s finalization means that content owners now have a theoretical standard to map to, but they don’t have any unified way to deliver the content. Sony is planning a 4K film digital delivery service for customers who buy its first 4K televisions, and is marketing a new lineup of films as “Mastered in 4K.” These are 1080p films that were converted from 4K digital masters and will supposedly offer enhanced quality for a “near-4K experience.”

The Blu-ray Disc Association is investigating ways to support 4K in the Blu-ray Disc standard, but that’s not going to be simple. H.264 can theoretically be extended to cover this resolution, but the bandwidth problem is going to rear its head at that point. An H.264 4K Blu-ray film needs far more storage space than an H.265 version of the same content. Problem is, existing players don’t support 100-128GB BDXL discs, either.

There’s no solution that doesn’t break compatibility with the existing Blu-ray standard in some form. Who wins the debate may depend on who gets stuck bearing the cost. Updating to the H.265 standard wouldn’t require any changes to disc manufacturing but might require all-new players, while high-density discs might work in some current players, but would require a manufacturing overhaul.

Another big question for later this year will be console support. Sony’s PS2 and PS3 helped launch both the DVD and Blu-ray standards. The PS4 could theoretically do the same for 4K content, provided there’s some consensus about how 4K content is going to be delivered in the future and what standards support it.

For now, we’re cautious about making claims for the new standard. We know it does one thing well — reduce bandwidth consumption at a given quality level. That benefit could trickle down to battery life improvements when streaming video, provided the higher power consumption of decoding doesn’t offset the radio’s lower power consumption. It could make 1080p broadcasting and 4K video a reality — but not until Sony and other media giants decide how to package said content.

Oh yeah?!? Well I’m waiting for the Uber Hyper Super Duper Max Mega To infinity And Beyond Ultra High Def TV and I’m gonna connect it to my computer which is rockin a 9800GTX+ heck yeah baby!!

Marcus2012

You’re both idiots.

Érico Galindo

You may want to update your eyeballs before that, pal.

http://www.facebook.com/people/Ryan-Kramer/1105233204 Ryan Kramer

It’s actually kind of nice to have a dominant codec that’s heads and shoulders above the rest. I know I should be rooting for competition, but I rarely wake up and say to myself, “Man, I wish I had more competing video codecs out there. ;-)”

chojin999

The fact is.. competing against who exactly ? And developed by what companies?
All major hardware manufacturers and software houses in the industry joined the MPEG-Group and ITU-T many years ago to create these standards.

It’s not that the MPEG-LA MPEG-Group is something on its own. It is a group lead by all major companies and corporations that use their resources on R&D to come up with new better standard codecs. That is the whole point.

http://www.facebook.com/people/Ryan-Kramer/1105233204 Ryan Kramer

That’s what I’m saying. Thank goodness for no competition! Audio in the world of HTML 5 across multiple browsers is the scenario I don’t want for next gen video.

Marcus2012

I agree, that fact that I run into VC-1 every now and again is annoying, but to have actual competition? that’d be kind of a pain in the ass.

Taylor Holmes

Can we finally have a fiber-optic protocol for video? PLEASE? We’ve some for audio for a while. Trying to bend over backwards to compress data is great, and if we combine it with fiber-optic transmission, the only bottlenecks are the RAM and the displays themselves.

Taylor Holmes

Can we finally have a fiber-optic protocol for video? PLEASE? We’ve had some for audio for a while. Trying to bend over backwards to compress data is great, and if we combine it with fiber-optic transmission, the only bottlenecks are the RAM and the displays themselves.

Joel Hruska

No one is building fiber optic to the home anymore. Verizon stopped building FiOS in new cities 3-4 years back. There’d be no point. In order to make that happen, you’d have to get carriers on board with the idea — and Comcast, TimeWarner, and AT&T aren’t interested in upgrading their equipment end-to-end to support it.

Makus Zapojecky

If you look at first picture, you can see floor tile lines being much sharper and less compressed than on HEVC which is blurry as if it was at 50% bit rate…

http://francojtorres.com/ Franco J. Torres

I barely bought my first 1080p HD smart TV, now UHD TVs are on the horizon? Damn you Moore’s Law!

chojin999

Sony bought the holographic disc technology some years ago which would mean 250GB and 500GB discs at least.

And Sony bought back its Cell architecture from Toshiba too.

However current Sony managers are so lame that have developed the Playstation4 as a very cheap AMD x86/x64 based PC just like the rumored XBox720/XBoxNext.

Also this awful cheap Playstation4 design is at best going to add BDXL 100/128GB optical drive support. And no initial 4K content support either. Too little too late.

Which means it’s going to suck big time.

What a failure bad multinational managers can do.

For selling UHDV content properly and quickly outstanding hardware better than what the Playstation3 was at the time needed to be delivered by Sony now.

Instead the Playstation4 is just going to be a huge messed up cheap product that is going to be outdated in less than 2 years time.

Without a new optical technology despite the technology being there in Sony hands and just needing to be mass produced and mass marketed properly.

With 250GB and 500GB discs UHDV up to Full 8K (32Megapixel) resolution could be achieved at very high bitrate with H265 which would mean very high quality = people buying the new hardware and displays and projectors to enjoy the amazing resolution.

That is not going to happen with just BDXL 100/128GB.. too low bitrate even for H265 .. 4K and 8K UHDV contents that look worse than 1080p due to bitrate constraints are not going to make manufacturers sell new hardware.

The Playstation4 is going to be a huge failure. Unless Sony managers trashed the current lame AMD x86/x64 rumored but almost confirmed design and went back to a Cell2 16-core with 500GB Holographic Optical Disc Drive even if that would mean delaying the release by 1-2 years.

Joel Hruska

1) Why would anyone stick with Cell? It’s capabilities have been outstripped by commodity GPUs.

Cell had two strengths — single and double-precision floating point math.IBM’s PowerXCell 8i was capable of 104GFLOPs of double-precision / 230 GFLOPs of single-precision math in 2010.

So let’s say you went with two of those *and* cranked up the clock speed. Target 500 GFLOP single-precision, 250 GFLOP double precision.

Games don’t need double precision, so we’re talking about single-precision figures. 500 GFLOPs is a nice figure. It’s also less than a commodity Radeon 7570 can deliver. A Radeon 7770 delivers over a teraflop of single-precision floating point performance.

Also, regarding holographic discs, no one has ever brought a high-density holographic storage medium to market. THey’ve been floating out their in RSN territory for years. And you can’t roll out holographic storage in and of itself — you need a video standard and a disc medium to go with it.

Also? Holographic storage isn’t very fast. You wouldn’t want to see the read/write or copy times for the standard.

A few years back, GE developed a new micro-holographic tech
capable of burning 500GB onto a DVD-sized disc. Now the company’s
technology research group has come up with an optical disc writer
capable of recording data to disc at the same speed as Blu-ray
technology.

Unlike a current disk, which has just four layers at the surface area
for data recording, a hologram disc contains three-dimensional patterns
that represent bits of information throughout the entire volume of the
disc. The newly developed writer uses a laser, set at the same
wavelength as Blu-ray technology, to erase parts of the holograms to
encode the data. According to PhsyOrg, burning happens at the rate of 4-5 megabytes per second, which is on par with Blu-ray.

GE says the new writing technology will bring micro-holographic media
one-step closer to the commercial market, as the discs could be read
and recorded on systems that are very similar to current tech. The
writing system’s similarity to Blu-ray might also make it so future
micro-holographic players will be backwards compatible for playing older
DVDs and Blu-rays.

When GE first announced their micro-holographic tech, it might have
seemed like the next step after Blu-ray. But with the shift toward
streaming and digital software distribution, disc-based media may be on
its way out.

Is physical media dead? Or do we want hard drives on a DVD? Leave a comment.”

Joel Hruska

Chojin,

I’m familiar with the technology and the demos.

Show me shipping products. For any purpose / business segment.

Not just “Planning to ship” or “In development.”

Maybe you’re familiar with resources I don’t know about. To the best of my knowledge, no company is currently shipping holographic storage systems. No company has stated that it plans to do so in any near-term time frame.

The Holographic Versatile Disc (HVD) is an optical disc
technology developed between April 2004 and mid-2008 that can store up
to several terabytes of data on an optical disc 10 cm or 12 cm in
diameter. The reduced radius reduces cost and materials used. It employs
a technique known as collinear holography, whereby a green and red laser beam are collimated in a single beam. The green laser reads data encoded as laser interference fringes from a holographic layer near the top of the disc. A red laser is used as the reference beam to read servoinformation from a regular CD-style aluminium
layer near the bottom. Servoinformation is used to monitor the position
of the read head over the disc, similar to the head, track, and sector
information on a conventional hard disk drive. On a CD or DVD this servoinformation is interspersed amongst the data. A dichroic mirror layer between the holographic data and the servo data reflects the green laser while letting the red laser pass through. This prevents interference from refraction of the green
laser off the servo data pits and is an advance over past holographic
storage media, which either experienced too much interference, or lacked
the servo data entirely, making them incompatible with current CD and
DVD drive technology.[1]

Standards for 100 GB read-only holographic discs and 200 GB recordable cartridges were published by ECMA in 2007,[2][3] but no holographic disc product has appeared in the market. A number of release dates were announced, all since passed.[4]

Holography System Development Forum

The Holography System Development Forum (HSD Forum; formerly the HVD
Alliance and the HVD FORUM) is a coalition of corporations purposed to
provide an industry forum for testing and technical discussion of all
aspects of HVD design and manufacturing.

As of February 2011, the HSD Forum comprised these corporations[citation needed]:

Hoplon Infotainment

Alps Electric Corporation, Ltd.

CMC Magnetics Corporation

Hitachi

Mitsubishi

Dainippon Ink and Chemicals, Inc. (DIC)

EMTEC International (subsidiary of the MPO Group)

Fuji Photo Film Company, Ltd.

Konica Minolta Holdings, Inc.

Lanix

LiteOn Technology Corporation

Moser Baer, (India)

Mexican Digital Media Storage Organization

Mitsubishi Kagaku Media Company, Ltd. (MKM)

Nippon Kayaku Co., Ltd.

Nintendo

Nippon Paint Company, Ltd.

Optware Corporation

Pulstec Industrial Company, Ltd.

Shibaura Mechatronics Corporation

Software Architects, Inc. (?)

Suruga Seiki Company, Ltd.

Targray Technology International, Inc.

Teijin Chemicals, Ltd.

Toagosei Company, Ltd.

Tokiwa Optical Corporation

Standards

On December 9, 2004 at its 88th General Assembly, the standards body Ecma International
created Technical Committee 44, dedicated to standardizing HVD formats
based on Optware’s technology. On June 11, 2007, TC44 published the
first two HVD standards:[7] ECMA-377,[2] defining a 200 GB HVD “recordable cartridge” and ECMA-378,[3] defining a 100 GB HVD-ROM disc. Its next stated goals are 30 GB HVD cards and submission of these standards to the International Organization for Standardization for ISO approval.[8]

Holographic Discs technology exists. It has been developed for years along with standards. And it’s fast and reliable.

What is lacking is a marketing agreement for mass market adoption.

And Sony could be the only one able to push the technology just like they did with Blu-Ray.

BDXL 100/128GB medium is not enough for H265 UHDV 4K content and surely not for UHDV 8K.

Marcus2012

He never said it didn’t exist, and no HVD is dead, has been for like 7 years.

Dave Haynie

The 8 core AMD they’re using in the PS4 will be substantially faster than the PS3’s general CPU resources. And it will have a new Radeon GPU core, also a big improvement. That’s all they need. This is also far closer to the hardware platform game designers know, rather than the oddities of programming SPUs on the PS3.

There’s no need for BDXL, even. The PS3 currently handles Blu-ray at 72Mb/s — the peak for the 3D format. And keep in mind, the PS3 shipped on Profile 1, and got the 1.1, 2.0, and 5.0 upgrades. That’s a pretty powerful reason to love the PS3 as a Blu-ray player… and for Sony to continue the tradition. Red’s RedRay player is delivering 4K at 20Mb/s, using a proprietary CODEC apparently.

If you just take the 4K as being 4x the necessary storage as 2K doing the same thing, then cut that back in half, counting on H.265 halving the bitrate, you’re already at 4K on Blu-ray being no worse than 3D HD. And in practice, you never need to scale your encoding rate to your raw video rate… just as Blu-ray didn’ t need 6x the bitrate of DVD using the same MPEG-2 CODEC, Blu-ray 4K won’t need 4x the HD rates using the same CODEC. You’re slicing the same thing smaller.

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